Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an ink jet recording apparatus and a pre-transportation processing method for the ink jet recording apparatus.
Description of the Related Art
Ink jet recording technologies have hitherto been widely researched and developed because they have an advantage in that, for example, printers are capable of being manufactured at relatively low cost using the ink jet recording technologies and have been in widespread use in consumer equipment including printers and multifunction peripherals. Ink jet recording apparatuses have been used also for recording on relative large recording media, such as sheets of A1 size and A0 size, in recent years.
In a general ink jet recording apparatus (hereinafter also simply referred to as a printer) that performs the recording on a relatively large medium, a main tank that stores ink is connected a recording head that ejects the ink via a supply tube or the like. In many printers, the main tank communicates with atmospheric air via, for example, a buffer tank (buffer room) that temporarily stores the ink. In such a printer, the ink level in the buffer tank is set below an ejection port surface of the recording head in the direction of gravity (so-called water head difference method) to keep the pressure in the recording head to a negative pressure.
When the main body of such a printer is inclined, the pressure in the recording head is changed to a positive pressure or a negative pressure having a large absolute value. As a result, meniscus formed at the ejection ports of the recording head is destroyed to possibly cause leakage of the ink from the election ports or an air communication port of the buffer tank. In addition, when the temperature or the atmospheric pressure of the environment in which the main body of the apparatus is positioned is greatly varied, the air in the recording head, the supply tube, and/or the main tank expands to possibly cause leakage of the ink from the ejection ports or the air communication port of the buffer tank.
The leakage of the ink presents problems in transportation after the apparatus is used (also referred to as secondary transportation) (hereinafter also simply referred to as transportation) because the main body of the apparatus is greatly inclined or the environmental temperature or the atmospheric pressure is greatly varied during the transportation.
Accordingly, in transportation of a printer, a method of automatically discharging substantially the entire volume of ink in the printer before the transportation has hitherto been adopted.
In addition, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2007-313829 discloses an apparatus of manually connecting an ink recovery tube to a sub-tank provided between the main tank and the recording head to recover the ink in the printer before transportation.
However, with the apparatus described in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2007-313829, since it is necessary to manually perform the operation while confirming the procedure with reference to a manual or the like in order to recover the ink in the printer, use of the apparatus is troublesome to a user.
Since a lot of ink is discharged with the method of automatically discharging substantially the entire volume of ink in the printer in related art, the waste ink volume is increased. In addition, the waste ink volume is further increased due to, for example, increase in the number of colors of ink in recent years or provision of the sub-tank allowing the main tank to be replaced also during a recording operation.